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Aug. 20, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
02:03:07
Dave Collum: Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution 2025-08-20 19:17
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dave collum
01:35:18
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tucker carlson
22:59
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Speaker Time Text
tucker carlson
How could?
dave collum
And our Zoom group, by the way, had had Scott Atlas.
And so I asked Scott, I said, Scott, was it malicious?
Fauci and Burke's did what they do was malicious.
And I think it was.
I mean, I think there's evil forces behind those two, but he took a different tack.
He said, you cannot fathom how stupid those two are.
That was his answer.
He said, Fauci never gave a scientific argument, never.
And he said, one day, this is astonishing.
He said, one day, this is all recorded.
So I'm not, you know, talking behind his back.
This is, there is a recording on the internet with this.
He says, one day he walks in with a scientific paper that Atlas had read.
And so he's thinking, whoa, Fauci is actually going to say something scientific.
Fauci went to say encephalomyelitis.
Now, if you work at the 711, you might stumble on that one, but if you're head of the entire health organization, you shouldn't.
And he said he boxed it so bad it was unintelligible.
And Atlas said, come again, what did you just say?
And Fauci wouldn't repeat it.
He said Burks was yanking shit off the internet, making pie charts, having not a clue what it meant, not a clue.
tucker carlson
That's terrifying.
dave collum
Now, but here's the thing.
You're a Christian Atlas, though.
He didn't speak up, I don't think.
tucker carlson
Fauci.
dave collum
Atlas, I think he sat there.
tucker carlson
Can I ask you to back up just a moment though?
So you're describing now incompetence, but you alluded earlier to malice.
What do you think the dark forces behind Burks and Fauci were?
dave collum
Well, I think they first of all, they love the fact we're talking about whether it came out of a lab in Wuhan, because that way we're debating whether to blame the Chinese or not, right?
When in fact, I think it came out of a lab probably in North Carolina.
A number of guys have tracked both the disease and the vaccine back years before it showed up on our dinner plate.
I think low level of malice would be.
tucker carlson
Wait, you think it came out of a lab in North Carolina?
dave collum
Yeah, Ralph Barrick.
Yeah, he you can follow, guy named David Martin has followed the patent trail.
And an artificial organism can be patented, not a natural one.
tucker carlson
Yes.
dave collum
And this, you can follow the patent trail on COVID and you can follow the vaccine patent trail and it can follow, watch it get moved around, move from point A to point B. If it was created in North Carolina, how did it get to Wuhan?
tucker carlson
And what was that?
dave collum
Because we were funding research in Wuhan because we were not allowed to do gain of work.
tucker carlson
It's all right.
This is a topic that deserves some table-topping.
dave collum
I've done podcasts where I have headphones and I have three Boston Terriers, soon four, and they snore.
I can't hear them because my headphones are noise dampening.
And then I listen to the podcast and you hear this humongous amount of snoring behind me.
So I'm aware of background.
tucker carlson
You didn't bring the terriers this morning.
dave collum
I didn't bring the terriers, though.
So, but you, I just want to fleshes out a bit you think it was created or begun in north carolina then brought to wuhan for to be elaborated to be studied to be so i think we took everything offshore because it got uh gain of function got banned in the us i but i don't think we banned it there were something like 36 bio bio weapons labs in ukraine yeah of us origin Yes.
So why is Ukraine perfect?
Ukraine's perfect to run a bio weapons lab.
You need first world infrastructure.
tucker carlson
Yep.
dave collum
And third world people to test shit on.
Ukraine's pretty much got that, right?
Because Fauci, for example, in the United States, when he had to do clinical trials, when one of his lower rank, they'd go to foster care.
They would do clinical trials on foster children.
tucker carlson
What?
dave collum
Yeah, you got to read Kennedy's book.
Yeah.
He did an estimate.
They used an estimate of 13,000, 14,000 foster kids to do clinical trials.
They said the kids would figure out they're getting sick and they wouldn't want to take the meds.
tucker carlson
That's so, that's like not so.
dave collum
I think Fauci's been doing damage to people and killing people for men for many, many years.
tucker carlson
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But to do clinical trials on foster kids, I thought after the Second World War, when both the Japanese and the German Germans were doing things like that.
dave collum
Nuremberg Code.
tucker carlson
Well, exactly.
It was codified there, but for scientists, but for the rest of the world and certainly American culture, we were taught that testing potentially dangerous drugs on people without their full consent or on the weakest among us or euthanizing mental patients or whatever, all that was bad.
I thought that was one of the big lessons of the Second World War.
dave collum
Well, as we both know, that there are no rules.
tucker carlson
Well, that's boy, is that the truth?
dave collum
There are no rules, right?
There are none.
There are rules for us, you and me.
But there are subjects for which people could be thrown in prison.
You know, a great example would be Diddy.
So what happened with Diddy?
I think what happened with Diddy is Diddy had a bunch of very incriminating tapes.
I think, you know, Epstein Light.
And I think they arrested him to round it all up.
all the data.
I think they did it to get all the data away from Diddy because he was being sued in civil court.
And the guilty party said, we got to get it out of there before the civil court gets it.
And so they arrested him.
What did they just convict him of?
unidentified
Nothing.
dave collum
They could have put him away for 20 years based on what he did to Justin Bieber.
Right?
They didn't even get him on any of that.
So it's a classic.
It's a classic case.
I know I sound like a nutcase, but you've had a lot of nutcase on your show.
tucker carlson
I had a good.
dave collum
My brother is trying to dial me back.
His day they're going to think you're a nutcase if you talk about all the things you think about.
And I go, well, I think that ship has sailed.
tucker carlson
You know, as I said to, well, I thought that was the whole point of academic research was the, you know, the predicate for it, the basis of it is free thinking.
dave collum
Well, but according to Douglas Murray, I'm not supposed to talk about it unless I'm an expert.
tucker carlson
Well, you are a demonstrable expert in your area, I mean.
dave collum
Which is not Diddy.
tucker carlson
It's not Diddy.
You're not a tenure professor of Diddy studies at Cornell.
We could have it, you know, we do have subjects and So you think the point of arresting Diddy was to shut down inquiry into what Diddy was doing?
dave collum
Get the data, right?
tucker carlson
Well, that's clearly the point of the first Jeffrey Epstein arrest.
dave collum
Hunter Biden's laptop.
tucker carlson
Tell me your view of Hunter Biden's laptop.
dave collum
Well, Sydney, what's her name?
Lawyer, come on.
Sydney Powell.
tucker carlson
Yep.
dave collum
Elite lawyer, now down a few notches because you work for Trump and that always gets you in trouble.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Said that if, if, uh, if Hunter Biden's laptop were ever released, no, if Anthony Wiener's laptop were ever released, the government would fall.
Wiener's laptop had kill switches in it.
I mean, it was filled with crap that wasn't supposed to be there.
We never get to see it.
Supposedly, nine cops watched the videos on, on, on, on Wiener's laptop.
They had to keep leaving the room because they couldn't stand what they they were seeing.
And all nine are now dead.
And there's names and faces and deadness, right?
They're real people.
Now you could say, well, maybe they died for other reasons.
I go, but it's still nine cops.
And, you know, it's like the five cops who died after January 6, right?
The four of them were suicides.
Out of according to AI, there were about 80 cops really in the thick of things.
Four of them died from suicide.
I don't need any more information to wonder what the hell is going on there.
That's one of those standalone observations where I go, that's not right.
The math of that doesn't work for me.
I've got pictures of Ukrainians.
See, I'm going off topic.
I've got pictures of you known Ukrainian operatives with, with, I can believe this, with the QAnon shaman guy, the guy with the horns in January 6 at January 6.
What is that all about?
I've got videos.
tucker carlson
This seems totally normal.
dave collum
Yeah, yeah, totally.
tucker carlson
I've got videos of the National Guard 100 yards away, not doing anything.
dave collum
I've got videos of John Sullivan, right?
The guy who was supposedly antifa, but antifa said, no, he's a fed, don't talk to him.
Who then filmed Ashley Babbitt getting shot.
This guy's getting around.
tucker carlson
What, what's your image of an antifa person lost soul tattoos everywhere right no meaning in life right yeah and no no path forward really if they're real that is if they're if they're real but i mean if you look at the mugshots of antifa arrest or the people who came to my house the antifa there i mean these are you know obviously i disagree they threaten my family i don't like them and all that but you also feel like these are like one step above homeless like these are right losers
Right.
dave collum
And so if he's Antifa, it's really odd that he was a nationally ranked cyclist.
unidentified
Are you serious?
dave collum
What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose.
Now, there's a mugshot.
You follow this Patriot Front story.
I'm really, this is, now the helmet's on, the leash to the jungle gym is on.
The Patriot Front guys, those guys who'd stomp around looking like neo-Nazis who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces.
You get arrested and they're handcuffed with their backpacks still on and their megaphone still over their shoulders.
And then I saw mugshots of them.
Not a single tattoo.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
tattoos.
These are neo-Nazis.
Not a single tattoo.
tucker carlson
They didn't have like Waffen SS lighting bolts on their cheeks.
dave collum
Right.
So we are in this big Walter Kernish.
We're in this made for the internet plot.
Walter is great in his description of the I've been tracking the Mangioni story.
It's not the right story.
There's something wrong in it.
Walter laid it out.
Now what Walter didn't say is who's behind him.
tucker carlson
That's obviously the question.
I mean, you can look at all of these different stories, particularly the acts of violence, which are because they are acts of violence, are, you know, examined much more closely than any other kind of act.
And it like doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
I mean, the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania's.
dave collum
Oh, I wrote about that.
Everything.
Do you know what I just read the other day?
The guy who shot Thomas Crooks, right?
There were bullets flying all over that place.
But it was a catastrophically poorly set up defense of Trump.
But the guy who shot Thomas Crooks was the same guy who organized the protection of Trump.
And they said, oh, you know, he didn't get convicted of anything and other guys didn't.
I go, well, so the guy who was in charge of making sure that after the assassination was done, he popped the assassin is somehow not getting prosecuted.
Why am I not shocked?
tucker carlson
So you're saying he was the Jack Ruby figure here.
dave collum
He was the Jack Ruby figure, yes.
So, so what was odd about that story?
Well, first of all, all the news agencies were there.
This was a totally irrelevant rally in an irrelevant place, Butler, Pennsylvania.
And there's a stranger story there.
And again, I just pick up these shards and sometimes they fit together into a story and sometimes it's just put it in your head, keep it there until you get more detail.
There's a guy sitting behind Trump named Joseph Fusca.
Fusca is his last name.
I've seen him before many times.
He was by the QAnon guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs, said to be, you're not going to believe it, said to be John F. Kennedy Jr. waiting to come back and save the world.
And I'm going, oh, you guys have lost your minds.
Finally, you've really gone.
It doesn't matter that that's a total croc.
Fusca is this guy and they say now his name is Fusca and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, but he's one of those supposedly JFK junior in disguise.
Fusca was there sitting right behind Trump.
I know of all the rallies, there he is.
tucker carlson
Who is he?
dave collum
I don't know.
And what's really interesting is that Trump gets shot, everyone's reacting and Fusca's not.
And then there's two pieces of footage.
tucker carlson
When you say you've seen him before, you've seen him in photographs before.
dave collum
Oh, he had been talked about.
I've dug down some deep rabbit holes and found this guy.
So one of the things you discover., you know this as well as anyone, you think you're going down a rabbit hole and you discover go back like teppy.
You get down the rabbit hole and you go, this thing, this, there's a, there's an entire ecosystem down here that people don't know exists.
Once you, it's like once you, you ask, how did Kennedy get killed?
And you go, oh boy, you know, that's troubling, right?
And then building seven, which you talked with Ron Johnson, who by the way, was in our Doc Zoom group, right?
When I'm talking, we had everyone, we had everyone.
Once you go down one or two of these, then you go, I, I, I can't trust anything.
And I'm, I work in a field where you're supposed to be able to get the facts and say, Now, here's an odd story.
A friend of mine is binding all my annual reviews that I write.
I write one blog a year.
I've been thinking about why.
tucker carlson
And, and I can, can you just pause and describe what that is?
That's really a reason I wanted to talk to you is because your, your interview is, you know, well known among people who are paying attention.
What is it and why do you do it?
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dave collum
So I stopped paying 100% attention to chemistry and started on the side looking at markets when I became a boomer with some wealth.
And I became, it was a tech bull.
And then by 98, I realized the markets were in trouble.
I'd read enough books, read enough blogs, read enough articles.
And so, and then that naturally led me to politics.
Because if you don't understand politics, you don't understand economics.
uh in around 07 i wrote a i used to on this chat board i was at i'd write a summary at the end of the year and part of it was to to make sure that my fairly extreme views weren't costing me serious pain and suffering.
And instead of getting 200 clicks, because this group is about 200 of us talking, it went to like 4000.
I go, what happened?
They said, oh, I put it on my blog.
Someone told me that.
So in 2009, I decided to do it seriously.
I said, 30 years of investing.
So I wrote this thing.
I said 30 years of investing from the cheap seats was the title.
And it went wild, actually.
And part of it was because I'd been highly successful as a rank amateur through the 90s as a tech bull.
I made 700% on WorldCom and then got out.
I made 700% on Dell, Warner Lambert.
I thought I was a genius.
And so I had years where I made over 100% without leverage.
And then I got out.
And I got out due to Y2K, which turns out to be a grift.
It took me decades to figure that out.
I thought I just blew it.
But no, Silicon Valley selling software and hardware.
And I can make Dell's or whatever you want, but it's not worth it.
And then I started paying attention to politics.
And then I just went deeper and deeper down rabbit holes.
I know I'm reading about Putin in 2012, trying to understand what's going on there and stuff like that.
So I just kind of naturally go down rabbit holes.
Now, you can't market a blog worse than writing one a year, right?
That's about as bad as you get.
And I don't charge for it.
So there's that.
And then I realized though.
The reason it works for me is if I wrote a blog once a week, most of them would be garbage because imagine how many blogs.
I would have written about how Trump and Elon are best friends, right?
And now it seems irrelevant.
I'd be writing about how Trump and Elon are enemies.
And then a month from now, it'll be irrelevant because they'll be best friends again, right?
And so you could, I could not write a weekly blog.
And so what I do is, is I, by writing once a year, gives me a long time to think about.
So I get the idea and then I sort of watch, go, oh, look at that.
That's a puzzle piece right there.
So it essentially is book length, 250, 300 pages every fall.
tucker carlson
And you don't charge for it.
dave collum
And you also can't write it in March.
That's not a year in review.
So I usually end up with about 700 pages of links and notes.
And if I see something, we talked before about using tripe metaphors, you know, how we both hate it.
But once in a while, I'll see a way to insult a person.
I'll go, oh, I'm saving that.
Right.
Now, the other reason it's really great.
tucker carlson
I think where do people find it?
dave collum
It's published at peak prosperity.
And it's my pin tweet.
So it stays up there all year.
And then until I publish the next one.
And it gives me the chance to collect the information, to ponder what's going on that year.
And some things become irrelevant, so I don't write about them.
Some things become trite, right?
But I think my analysis of the 2016 election, for example, is really good.
The prophetic line.
I was watching BET.
Please don't get me to explain why I'm watching BET and Black Entertainment today something whatever and some burly black guy's talking about trump and he says forget the messenger listen to the message listen i'm going holy moley right turns out he was the head of the new Black Panther Party.
I go, Trump just got endorsed by the Black Panthers.
And then I saw Jimmy Brown, the running back, say he will be a president of the people.
And all of a sudden, and so I wrote, it might just be a flicker, but I think the Black community's moving to the right.
And boy, was that ahead of its time?
And so what I won't do is write about something that I was writing about.
Why?
The other problem I face is that I don't write about stuff.
I'm an expert.
I write about stuff that I know nothing.
And so when I wrote about I've been following Putin, but when the Ukraine war came, first thing I noticed, I bet you noticed it too, it wasn't a war.
It was a police action.
And they weren't killing people.
They were moving troops across the border.
They were talking to Ukrainians.
They were, and I kept saying to my wife, this is not a war.
And you see some grandma, they're going, ah, this is just really terrible.
You know, and I'm going, that's not a war.
You want to see a war?
Look at Baghdad day one.
That's a war.
That's what a war looks like, right?
You'd see an explosion from twenty miles away.
You wouldn't know what blew up, right?
Like my wife thought I was not nuts.
I go, it's not a war.
It's not a war.
Well, it became a war because, as you and I both know, NATO wanted a war.
And so it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fastball past NATO's chin and saying, back off on this whole NATO thing.
Correct.
And so when I wrote about that, I found about twenty to forty guys who were trying to get it right, which includes you.
And includes guys like Max Abramson.
Do I know that?
Do I have that right?
Glenn Greenwald, the guy who died, what's his name?
The guy who got killed by the Ukrainians.
tucker carlson
Gonzalo O'Leary, the American who was murdered by the Ukrainian government.
dave collum
We could have gotten him out with a phone call and we chose not to.
Because the narrative was Putin's bad.
Ukraine's a bunch of really nice guys, super nice guys.
It's a democracy.
What a crack of shit.
That was a lie from head to toe.
We wanted a war.
We still want a war.
I have intelligence friends too, not like you, but I have them.
And I was talking to one the other day.
I think he likes to talk to me because he can talk to me about these subjects.
And in his universe, I'm the only guy he can talk to for which he does have to worry because everyone else.
in his world is connected to everyone else in his world.
So I think he likes to have real honest conversations.
One day we're on the phone, he says, Do you do signal?
I go, Yeah.
So we went to signal.
He said someone was listening to us.
Boy.
tucker carlson
There's a lot of that.
dave collum
There's a lot of that.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I know.
dave collum
So there's always a narrative.
There's always one narrative.
And we're now in an era where you only get to talk about that narrative.
You know that.
I know that.
You and I, we're just mutually.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
And the penalties for straying from the story are.
dave collum
We get fired.
tucker carlson
Are real.
Yeah.
Totally.
I mean, whatever.
There's been no age in human history where telling the truth, the real truth is rewarded.
dave collum
So, so, so where you first really won me over.
So, you and I agree that when you were young you were a punk.
Yeah.
The fact that you're so proud of the metamorphosis is great.
It may have come before this, but where I noticed it was the Las Vegas shootings, where as we kind of talked a little bit at breakfast, um, here's the funny story.
They interviewed that night a guy named Mike Kronk.
tucker carlson
And Mike Kronk told the night of the shooting.
dave collum
The night of the shooting.
tucker carlson
That was 2017, maybe.
dave collum
I can't remember.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And Mike Krock told this story.
He didn't look very emotional, which I found a little odd.
I, by the way, think all the shootings within an air bar are not what they appear to be.
I'll take it all the way back to Columbine, if you want.
But Mike Krock talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds of yards away.
And later, a marksman said, not possible, too much spray.
A sniper would be required to hit a guy three times.
And the guy was just doing this, right?
And Mike says his friend stuck his fingers in the bullet his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding.
I'm going, now you're lying.
Why is Mike lying right away?
Red flag.
Why is Mike lying?
tucker carlson
And who is he, by the way?
dave collum
Well, that's a great question.
So Mike then finishes Howard.
They put him on a cart and wheeled him out.
tucker carlson
May I just ask why?
dave collum
I'll tell you in a minute.
tucker carlson
Why did you know he was lying when he said his friend put his own fingers in?
dave collum
Because you don't, you don't get shot three times in the chest and provide your own health care.
Fair, fair.
unidentified
Right?
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dave collum
So then like YouTube, you see it rolls over 15 seconds and then it goes to the next YouTube.
And we're watching Vegas like you watched 9-11, right?
It was really 500 people.
It is the biggest shooting.
It's probably Gettysburg.
tucker carlson
Yes.
dave collum
Right?
When was the last time you heard a gun antagonist say, remember Vegas?
We got to get rid of guns.
tucker carlson
Never.
dave collum
Never.
unidentified
Right.
dave collum
And you know.
why.
So it rolls to the next interview and it's Mike Crock, new network, same guy.
He tells the same story.
Now he's looking a little more emotional and his story changes just a little, just a little around the edges.
And then it rolls to the next interview and there's Mike Crock again.
And I go, what, you got 22,000 people and why are you interviewing Mike Crock?
And then there were oddities that always show up like some lady walking through the crowd saying you're all gonna die tonight and they will they carted her away and things like that.
Yeah, yeah, weird stuff.
And so I tried to figure out who Mike Crock was.
He's just some hick from Alaska, right?
Just some hick from Alaska.
After the fact, I looked and just picture him holding an elk by the horns, you know, that he shot.
The next day, the head of the police said, there's no way one guy did it.
The following day, he said, one guy did it.
It takes a long time to show one guy did it, right?
That's something you don't know.
There's a lot of debris before you figure that out.
There's now a documentary called Route 41.
So I dug into this.
What I noticed is you stayed with the story for about two weeks, maybe, and you were bringing it up, and Coulter jumped in, you know.
You know, Paddock was making money how?
Playing video poker.
That's his, that's the way he's making a living.
That's like saying I'm a professional crackhead.
And then what happens is there was shooting all over the place.
There was shooting everywhere.
tucker carlson
In the city that day.
dave collum
In the city that night.
And so now there's, if you don't believe me, there's this documentary called Route 41 and they got stuff I didn't know about, but they also got stuff that, um, did I, so it's kind of a answer key for me to use academic terms.
And if you watch Route 41, you will see there were shooters everywhere.
There are cop cameras showing shooters.
And then remember the guy got sh shot in the leg up on the floor where Paddock was?
tucker carlson
Yes, the guy.
dave collum
Some guy named Jesus or something, right?
Some illegal with two social security numbers.
unidentified
Hello.
dave collum
And then afterwards, reporters tried to get to his house.
His house was being protected by cars that had no license plates.
And then all of a sudden he goes to Mexico.
And when asked, well, where did he go?
They said, well, he was planning a trip to Mexico.
So when I wrote about it, I said, Oh, by the way, Jesus, when you get back, could you stop in?
We've got some questions for you, right?
And then he comes back and he does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres.
And Allen introduced him saying, and he's there with a handler I had already seen.
I'm going, wait a minute, that guy, I've been seeing that guy a lot, that other guy.
So Jesus is looking at his feet.
His name isn't Jesus, but it's something like that.
Allen introduced him, this is the only interview you're going to do and you have to get it off your chest.
I'm going, oh shit, here we go.
And then the handler's doing all the talk.
Jesus is looking at his feet.
And then we never hear about Jesus again.
Probably he's in some shallow grave somewhere because he's too inconvenient.
tucker carlson
But I tried to interview him at the time.
dave collum
Really?
tucker carlson
Yes.
I couldn't get to him because he drove to Mexico from Vegas.
dave collum
Right.
tucker carlson
Two of them did.
dave collum
Yeah, following an escort.
tucker carlson
Yeah, then he came back and yeah, I tried my hardest.
dave collum
Now Alan works for the company that owns Mandalay.
tucker carlson
His handler.
dave collum
Yeah.
No, no.
Alan did just.
tucker carlson
Oh, Alan, I'm so sorry.
unidentified
Yeah.
dave collum
And so they're buttoning it down.
Now, what you see from Route 41 video is there was just an enormous amount of chaos.
There's enormous numbers of shooters.
Even that night, you were seeing videos from cab drivers saying they're shooting over here, they're shooting over there.
And there would be some chaos, but there's way too much.
There's guys who took audios and said, here's, here, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, and you hear that, that, that, that, that, that, that.
And so you could hear multiple guns, the whole thing.
So then what happened?
Mike Kronk, I start reading trauma surgeons saying there's something wrong with the story.
You know, if you get hit with, you know, what was AR-15 or something?
tucker carlson
Yeah.
And a.308, a bigger rifle.
dave collum
You're going to die out there.
You're going to bleed out right there.
Even if it doesn't hit a major artery, it's going to turn your leg to jello.
tucker carlson
Three chest wounds from a rifle?
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
dave collum
So, so what would he look like?
And so then I saw an interview of a, of a young woman and she's sitting there in a chair in the hospital and they're interviewing her.
I'm going, you look pretty perky.
And, and, and then, then Mike Kronk with the news crew goes in and interviews his friend.
Now, first and foremost, we know HIPAA says, you ain't bringing a news crew into a hospital room.
Second, we know three shots to the chest.
He'd be in the ICU.
The only way you'd know he's alive is that there'd be a beeping on the screen and he'd have hoses coming out of every orifice and he would look dead.
And so they take the news crew and they interview his friend.
He's got a nasal cannula.
A nasal cannula.
So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, so you're talking with three holes in your chest.
What are you sticking your fingers so the air doesn't come flying out of your chest holes, right?
unidentified
And then I notice the screen's not even plugged in.
dave collum
Now, what is Mike Cronk now?
He's a state senator from Alaska.
In Alaska, I think he's a state level state senator.
unidentified
What?
Yeah.
dave collum
Who's the chief of police?
He became governor of Nevada or something, right?
unidentified
So, so again, so there's a guy named John Cullen.
dave collum
who did an analysis of the shooting and his conclusion a relative a relative yeah no no no no no no it's well different John worked for Oracle.
He's some on the spectrum code head.
He also analyzed the Butler shooting, the audio of the Butler shooting.
tucker carlson
He's an on the spectrum code head.
dave collum
He's on the spectrum code head.
He he he he he sort of bears down and grips on something a little too firmly, I think, but but but he brings up his on the spectrum code heads.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I know.
dave collum
And he there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters behind the Mandalay and he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the Mandalay.
The story was that Muhammad bin Salman was on the top floor.
tucker carlson
The crown prince, the ruler of Saudi Arabia.
unidentified
Yes.
Yes.
dave collum
A guy whom a lot of people would like to kill and his theory is is that the Saudis tried to flush him out of there and on the way out they would cap him now they blew it if that's the story they blew it I think the helicopter idea is not bad but I I did a couple podcasts with John and I said John but what about all the shooting on the ground and John was kind of dismissive I go you can't dismiss it you can't let that stuff go your model's got to include that but um It occurred.
A year later, Muhammad, remember when Khashoggi got killed?
What was his name Jamal Khashoggi.
Now Anon Khashoggi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet.
Jamal Khashoggi is one who got diced up and fed to the camels.
Now he's a New York Times reporter.
I think he was also CIA.
tucker carlson
Washington Post columnist.
Yeah.
And he was killed in the embassy in Istanbul, I believe.
dave collum
Okay.
Supposedly on the anniversary of the Vegas shootings, Supposedly, Mohammed bin Salman had a party, locked the doors and showed a video of him getting sliced up and said to the royal sitting in the room, don't even think about it.
Now, when I wrote about Khashoggi, I was having a cow over Khashoggi right when he got killed.
I'm going, we're killing tens of thousands of Yemenis.
We killed five million people in the Middle East directly and indirectly due to our post 911 responses.
And I called him ODK, one dead Khashoggi.
I said, it is insane to worry about one dead guy in a region of the world where people die without reason all the time.
tucker carlson
Who is at war with his own government, the Saudi government?
I mean, I'm obviously not for vivisecting people, but I also think like they're, like, yeah, there's a scale of evil and starving kids.
is worse than what happened to Khashoggi.
I agree with you.
dave collum
Right.
So, you were the only mainstream guy who I watched steadily on the story, staying with the Vegas shootings, noting that there's something wrong.
tucker carlson
We got very hassled by law enforcement.
I'm sure you did, which was, you know, I worked at Fox News, obviously at the time, and big supporters of law enforcement.
I've always been a big supporter of law enforcement.
We've never gotten hassled anywhere, just the opposite.
Oh, you work for Fox News.
Oh my gosh, of course, slow down.
dave collum
Official law enforcement is what got me, man.
tucker carlson
I mean, they blocked our camera position.
Oh, yeah.
They were totally opposed to us doing that.
I've never had that experience.
dave collum
So let's stand the shootings just briefly.
Uvalde, there's problems all over that shooting.
Remember that shooting in Texas where the guy got in?
tucker carlson
Very exciting.
I knew the mayor.
Yes.
dave collum
There's problems all over the place because, first of all, there's something like eight hundred law enforcement guys within reach of the damn thing, and there's a ton of like five thousand people.
And then they didn't go in for seventy eight minutes or something.
tucker carlson
I don't remember.
dave collum
Excuse me.
You show me ten cops, eight of them have kids.
By a lot, I'm right now I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal.
It's about human behavior.
tucker carlson
Yeah, yeah.
dave collum
Yep, yep.
And out of those eight, eight would have gone in and said, I don't care what you say, I'm going in.
tucker carlson
Of course.
dave collum
You give me a soccer mom, she's going in, right?
And then there was the mom who did go in and her story was incoherent.
Her story, she came out and she said this and then she said this and it was not consistent.
And I'm going, that's just a narrative thrown on top of it.
tucker carlson
So what are we looking at here?
So KFabe.
What does that mean?
dave collum
KFabe is something Eric Weinstein wrote about.
He's asked to write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types.
And he said that politics was KFabe.
It was professional wrestling.
And there's all these layers.
There's all these tricks.
It's way more sophisticated than people think, the way you get, the way you engage the audience and you have some reality and some non-reality and things change.
And he talked about politics being K-Fabe.
I don't think anything you see can be interpreted literally and at face value.
tucker carlson
What would be the purpose, however?
dave collum
Well, as I was telling you, a friend's binding all my annual reviews, and I will probably make a thousand dollars off this i mean it's not getting rich um i'm paid probably 0.001 cent per hour pay for this task i had to go back i've been proofing the drafts from previous years and what i noticed about 2013 14 15 is something's changed and
what's changed is you could get facts And you felt like you were getting, and the stories would break and they would stay that way and they wouldn't be shifting around.
And you can say, okay, here's what happened in here, here, and this piece fits in here.
And now you can't.
Now it's like, and we talked about using trite metaphors.
Here's one, but I really like it.
It's like when your GPS starts randomly rerouting you.
And our GPS just keeps ranting, rerouting.
I'm not taking that right turn now, you know?
So you just boot the GPS and you break out your gazetteer and you figure out where you're going, right?
And so our GPS is rerouting us constantly.
And one of your guests, Mike Benz, who I occasionally chat with briefly, who's very impressive.
Impressive.
And as I've said, I don't know everything about him.
And I don't mean just in a casual way.
I think he's I think there's a complex story there.
But right now, he's saying the right stuff.
He gave a talk one day where he talked about how around 2013, the so-called deep state, which is a term I've tried to figure out where it came from.
And I think the guy who gets the most credit is kind of Peter Dale Scott, who wrote about drug trafficking, Berkeley professor, and he called it deep politics.
But I think it pre-dates that, but that's where I get it from.
He said the deep state realized they were losing control of the narrative.
They had underestimated the internet and social media.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
dave collum
And as a consequence, they had to get hold of it completely.
And so now this is where we're at.
Now we thought Trump was going to save us.
We thought Elon was going to save us.
My Twitter feed is a dumpster fire.
So instead of taking away data, they provide excess noise.
So now instead of trying to suppress the signal, you just increase the noise.
tucker carlson
I think that's very deep.
And I think it points to what's happening.
I would say it's clearly true.
dave collum
So what is a fact?
That was the title of last year's write-up, What is the Fact?
tucker carlson
Yeah, it's impossible.
You can't actually control the, you can't restrict the flow of information across the Internet.
dave collum
So you throw debris out there.
unidentified
Yeah.
tucker carlson
Right.
dave collum
It's like, it's like the pilots who throw the debris out the back of the plane so that the guided missiles don't know what to do.
tucker carlson
Of course, exactly.
Right.
dave collum
And they also throw out debris so that...
tucker carlson
QAnon was clearly that.
dave collum
QAnon.
Yeah, QAnon.
tucker carlson
What was QAnon?
dave collum
I don't know.
tucker carlson
I don't either.
dave collum
I have, you know, I'd be listening to something and it would have useful information and all of a sudden then it would show the whole and here's Trump and his generals are going to save the world.
No, I agree.
tucker carlson
But the interesting, I never did anything about QAnon.
I never paid any attention at all.
I have a good friend who I really admire is much smarter than I am, who because he is smarter than I am, took like a year to look into QAnon.
What do you get?
I don't fully understand it, but here's what I understand is that, um, you know, some of the predictions in QAnon came true.
I mean, it's a sophisticated thing.
It's not just, oh, I think it's a bunch of ex spooks.
For sure.
It's not a, you know, bunch of college kids on no four chan or whatever they claim it was.
dave collum
These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad.
tucker carlson
It would the point of it, and it's unclear, you know, who's behind it.
I have some theories, but um, people I know actually, but uh, but I don't know if they're true, but what I what is obvious to me is that it was it's a control mechanism trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a siphoning off the energy that's less dangerous direction.
dave collum
Right.
Focus on Wuhan.
Right.
Focus on the lab in Wuhan.
That's siphoning.
tucker carlson
It's all American politics.
Like have a race.
war.
Leave us alone as we plunder your country.
That's right.
dave collum
That's right.
There's a meme out there, there's a joke where the king and his, his, his right hand man, his chief of staff are looking at the angry townspeople.
Some have pitchforks and some have torches.
And the king says, Don't you have to worry.
You just convince the guys with the pitchforks are the enemies of the guys with the torches.
unidentified
Well.
tucker carlson
So you said that a couple of times.
Focus on Wuhan.
I've fallen for that, for that squirrel, squirrel, Wuhan-minded thing.
dave collum
A blind nut finds the squirrel.
tucker carlson
That's real.
I'm stealing that.
Making, making a note.
dave collum
That's an original.
I never know if I heard it and forgot where I got it, but that's an original.
tucker carlson
It's the squirrel.
What is that distraction?
dave collum
I think it is great.
You put me in an asylum overnight.
tucker carlson
An asylum overnight?
dave collum
Yeah, yeah.
My hotel's a former asylum.
tucker carlson
Is it really?
unidentified
Yeah.
dave collum
You didn't ask?
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
Oh, yeah.
It's a former asylum.
I said, you finally got it right.
tucker carlson
Well, I think there's wisdom here.
dave collum
There is wisdom here.
tucker carlson
What are they distracting us from by having us focus on Wuhan?
dave collum
Well, huge amounts of grift.
You had, you interviewed.
And Katherine Austin Fitz.
tucker carlson
Yes.
dave collum
I've been blessed.
tucker carlson
This smart woman.
dave collum
So I come out of nowhere.
I have no credentials beyond those that I can create, right?
And I think one of the ways you create it is by being truthful.
Yes.
And I know truth is everything to you.
tucker carlson
I try to make it that way.
dave collum
And actually in this book, The Moral Animal, they say the reason we self-delude is so that you can be truthful and deceive your opponent.
That's what self-delusion is.
unidentified
Yes.
dave collum
And I practiced a lot of that.
I've been adopted by some people who didn't have to adopt me.
And so, for example, I'm tight with Steve Hankey, who's a famous economist.
And Catherine has been very supportive.
And there's several dozen who somehow have decided that I'm worth their time and help me.
And so they're, they're useful to chat with.
They're useful to, But she talks about the huge amount of resources that have been siphoned off and the tens of trillions of dollars of resources that are available.
tucker carlson
I know Kathryn, if it's you can disagree with her, she's not nuts.
That's not true.
dave collum
She's not one?
tucker carlson
Nuts.
dave collum
Oh, no, I don't think she is nuts, right?
tucker carlson
No, no, no, no.
It's a grounded.
dave collum
She could have things wrong, but that's totally different.
And I had a friend, another friend who I think is phenomenal, tell me that she's nuts and don't, don't, don't get near her.
And I said, no, I don't think so.
And, and, but we all can get sucked down into the rabbit holes to the point you can't get out too.
There are days where I wish, why don't you just go play golf?
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Or right now, I'm on a, my house is hanging off a hundred foot cliff looking west over Cyga Lake.
I can literally throw rotten food off my deck and drop it down into the drink from I can I'll show you afterwards I'll show you photos.
It's the view is such that if there are places in the country where the view would cost $20 million, not in Ithaca of course.
And and and I have people come and visit they should.
It's beautiful.
I can't remember why I said that.
tucker carlson
That's probably saying that people dismiss um you know the the the few who are just committed to pursuing truth no matter what as crazy and you gave Katherine Austin Fitz as an example, but you said you can actually go crazy.
dave collum
Oh yeah, you can.
tucker carlson
By looking too carefully into.
dave collum
So the lake I'm on turned out broke the small New York state smallmouth bass record about three years ago, broke the New York state largemouth bass record last year.
And I used to fish all the time when I was a kid and I haven't fished it.
What's wrong with this picture?
tucker carlson
Well, if you got smallmouth bass there, I think you need to fish it on a fly rod.
It will totally change your life.
dave collum
It's not a fly rod, it's a deep lake.
tucker carlson
It's a But you can catch them on the surface with a popper.
If you do, if you catch a sizable smallmouth on a popper and a fly rod, you know.
dave collum
I'm an 18-foot deep shoal guy.
tucker carlson
Sinking line.
dave collum
But so, you know, my wife thought that I had fish removed from my thumbs because she never saw a picture of me that didn't have a fish hanging off my hand.
But I haven't fished it.
tucker carlson
Because you're absorbed in trying to figure out what's happening.
dave collum
I'm absorbed in raising kids.
I'm absorbed in other things.
My wife has issues I got to help her with.
And I have this fear of buying a boat.
tucker carlson
But you, as someone who has taken, you know, ample intellectual energy and intelligence.
intelligence and focused it on trying to figure out what are we watching which I think is like a fair way to describebe what you're doing, like what is this?
What's the truth of it?
Has that been worth doing?
dave collum
That's the question.
That is the question.
And there was a time where I thought if I could get to the truth then that would help in some way, but now it's not as clear.
Tell me what Well, you know, now first of all, what is the truth, right?
The truth is now becoming very ambiguous.
Last year I wrote about the history of World War II.
I did a mini Darryl Cooper.
tucker carlson
Yes.
dave collum
And it started when I read a book by Diana West, who would be good if you interviewviewed her.
And it was, it's all revisionist history of World War two.
And you go, well, why would you want to read that?
Well, it turns out I think the story we got about World War two is all wrong.
tucker carlson
I think that's right.
dave collum
And then I read about FDR and FDR's right hand man was a Soviet spy.
tucker carlson
Certainly was.
dave collum
Right?
and then confirmed confirmed we should have been one can make the argument we should have sided with hitler and fought stalin Patton said that.
So, and maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust, right?
You know, there's, but, but, but Stalin was awful by any metric, and we weren't his ally.
The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War two in Russian territory.
Fifteen to twenty thousand were missing and we left them there.
And then you read about Pearl Harbor.
We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor stories now, what we're told.
But I dug into that and you find out that we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked.
Stalin was going to be attacked.
He wanted us to take the Japanese off his flank.
And FDR's right hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy, right?
Then I read about FDR and the Great Depression.
You find out that every single penny he spent trying to help the forgotten Amity Schlees, the forgotten man, was spent to buy votes.
Every last penny.
He was a sociopath.
And everything, the only thing he could do was lie.
He was a compulsive liar.
His inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying.
And the only thing he's used for now is every time you want to grow government, you cite FDR.
And so I read half a dozen books that sort of went at these different angles and wrote about it.
So I start out knowing nothing and then I write about it and I try to write to learn, which is the most terrifying part of AI, by the way.
If you take out the writing, you take out the thought.
tucker carlson
Completely agree.
dave collum
The other thing that scares me about it, boy, they're a squirrel.
AI is going to make the system very unforgivingly brittle.
I'm not worried as much about the authoritarian slant that Elon occasionally talks about, which might be just to fake us out.
Who knows?
I am worried that we're going to reach a point where, you know, when everything, everything computer does is binary.
So you go to the grocery store, you slip your credit card in, it says you're good to go or didn't work.
Swipe it again.
Didn't work.
Sorry.
You're out of here, right?
They debank people.
This is a big problem.
happens when everything is so ai up that that there's no person anywhere within earshot who can help you at all.
No one who can say, okay, let me get this for you.
tucker carlson
Right.
There's been a misunderstanding or there's some sort of human nuance required.
dave collum
It happened on the other day on a credit card where I was talking to the lady and it kept sending me in these loops and she finally straightened out.
But what happens when the code is being written by computers?
So there's no human who understands the code.
So the system will be very brittle, be very unforgiving.
Forget about whether it's used nefariously.
Forget about whether someone uses it as an authoritarian tool, which is very real possibility.
And I worry about that a lot.
Just the fact that no one will know who's driving the cab ever on anything.
And also now you're taking out the intellectual part.
So when I write, when you write, when I write a scientific paper, the project's not done until I've written it because that's where you lay it out.
And if you can't put it on paper coherently with no internal contradictions, you're not done.
tucker carlson
You're not done understanding it.
dave collum
You're not done understanding.
So the idea of writing is understanding.
tucker carlson
I think people who don't write for a living or aren't forced to write regularly don't understand.
This concept is a hard one.
But it's through writing, or I would also say speaking, public speaking, that.
That putting concepts into words makes the concepts intelligible to the person who's articulating them.
Like you don't really understand something until you've been forced to write about it.
dave collum
It's like a comedy shop.
You go, you know, the great comedians will go down to the cheap old comedy shops to practice, to figure out what works and what doesn't work, right?
And then they go on Johnny Carson.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
And so, um, so you know, so when there's no writing, there's no thinking.
dave collum
Right.
So I read about Maui, the fires.
I wrote about that.
Very clearly a land grab.
You may remember how many kids died?
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
Do you remember the USA article said 750 kids are missing.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Right?
When a kid's missing after something like that, they're dead.
But they're not missing, they're dead.
Maybe a couple found their way, someone drove them out of town, but they're dead.
Try to find anywhere a statement about dead kids now.
You can't find it.
You go to Wikipedia, you search the word child, you search the word, you read it.
There's no mention of dead children.
There were 750 kids missing according to USA Today.
Then all of a sudden the governor says, well, you know, we're worried about land speculators, so we're going to buy the land up so that the speculators can't get it.
And I go, so you can sell it to your friends right is it possible maybe they mowed down lahaina because they want to put up resorts and things right but what also was out there was this idea of directed energy weapons starting the fires now i think that was a dead end i don't think directed energy weapons were used even though there's a it's they're called dews even though there's a dew facility on maui you don't need that And there were videos.
I think those are fake.
So I found nothing, but I used it as an excuse to read up on DEWs.
And I was reading RAND reports from forty years ago.
tucker carlson
And what is a directed energy weapon?
dave collum
It's basically Star Wars.
And so it's Reagan Star Wars and everyone said, Oh, that's just science fiction.
I go, Well, Gorbatchov seemed to want to get rid of them every chance he got.
So Gorbatchov took them very seriously.
So it turns out what you do is you put something in space and it shoots some kind of energy, guided energy down to the surface of the Earth.
And it could, the different frequencies have different efficacy.
And so some are really good at hitting a target.
Some broaden out like microwaves are different than some kind of ultraviolet laser.
I'm not very good at this stuff, but and then I started reading about how what they do is they use a pulse of one laser to punch a hole through the atmosphere and then the second pulse would go through that hole.
It's really clever stuff.
This is 40-year-old RAND reports.
What do they have behind the paywall 40 years later?
Now the best, I think, evidence of a DEW being used and I was reading about fires in different places where trees were burning that shouldn't have burned and cars that were there's I wrote about it.
Someone wants to go read it.
That was a couple of years ago.
The best evidence of a DEW.
So if you've got these, you got to test them, right?
It's like why you need, why you need, you know, bio-weapons labs in Ukraine.
You got to test them.
You can't use lab rats.
You look at the Quebec fires, satellite imagery of the Quebec fires, very mysterious.
About 26-ish fires started simultaneously.
How do you know some?
Well, if a fire starts and then another one starts, it'll be downwind.
So you'll see it'll look like the Hawaiian islands, right?
Right.
Boom, all at once.
26 fires in a crudely buckshot pattern.
There was 350 miles in diameter.
Boy, that's a determined arsonist or at least 26 of them.
Yeah, with in the middle of nowhere.
tucker carlson
Yeah, with helicopters.
I mean, there are no roads.
dave collum
So, but, but, and so, no, a cell phone can't do it, you know, not the, right?
They're in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden they all start simultaneously and I'm going, okay, that probably was them testing out their weapons and we have a lot of wars to test weapons, right?
tucker carlson
So you.
So your basic overarching theory is around 2014-15, it became clear to the people running the world that you can't keep information under wraps anymore because the internet is impossible to control.
And so you had to flood, flood people's brains with extraneous and misleading information.
dave collum
And shut down people.
unidentified
They shut, they booted the President of the United States off Twitter.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
How is that possible?
tucker carlson
Because he was a racist.
unidentified
That Right.
dave collum
You know, so many, so many like seventy thousand got booted off Twitter.
My sister in law, who's she had a Twitter feed, she can't get it back.
You know, they're somehow, I don't know how I should have.
tucker carlson
What was her crime?
dave collum
She must have said something favorable about Trump or something.
I don't know.
tucker carlson
So, but the control of information, the shaping of people's understandings of the world around them, that's, that's the whole game right there.
dave collum
So I used to say the internet was democracy's greatest hope and worst enemy.
And that it was a battle.
I don't think we're going to win it.
And the reason I don't is because it's too powerfulful.
And so whoever has control of it will then have that power.
So it's only a battle for who gets control of it.
tucker carlson
Control of information.
dave collum
Control of the digital world.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
So if you see voices out there dissenting from the I hear voices talking.
If you see or hear voices that are dissenting from the official storyline, they're going to have to be silenced or eliminated.
unidentified
I mean.
dave collum
Well, look at what happened.
Look at the ambushes that occurred when Thomas Massey, who I think is great, Rand Paul who I think has matured immensely, and who is the third Republican who stepped away from the narrative and all of a sudden the attacks were relentless.
Now that could just be Trump being Trump.
tucker carlson
It wasn't just Trump attacking them, though.
dave collum
I know.
tucker carlson
Marjorie Taylor.
dave collum
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who by the way, is not nearly as stupid.
I mean, she's not even stupid.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know.
dave collum
She ran a construction company.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know.
And her, she just doesn't have whatever that normal, the fear that controls people in DC, where like, I can't But how do you turn on Thomas Massey.
dave collum
Marjorie Taylor Greene at least played a role in KFabe that you could imagine drawing fire.
Massey's this guy, you know, who built his own house and fixes his own car.
And he's an engineer.
He's he's he's he's he's the he's an archetype of who we ought to be.
tucker carlson
As a country.
dave collum
As a country.
tucker carlson
I so vehemently and they turned on him.
Yeah, well, I haven't.
dave collum
We know why they turned on him.
tucker carlson
I texted with him this morning.
No, I I mean, you know, you could say I disagree with Thomas Massey, but if you think Thomas Massey is the problem, you are the problem.
I couldn't agree more.
I couldn't agree more just because, first of all, he's a decent man, which always matters to me, and I think it should matter to all of us.
You could, you know, give Thomas Massey a routing number and he's not going to take a dollar.
He's just not.
dave collum
He's not going to be the only one without a handler.
tucker carlson
That's true.
And I think we should admire that.
Even if you think that all members of Congress should be required to have handlers, it's okay to live in a world where one doesn't.
That's that what I find so.
dave collum
It's not okay to live in a world where everyone else does.
tucker carlson
No, I agree with you, but I just find what's so interesting and there's a religious quality to all of these conversations.
that I find so striking, it's like, it's okay if you have, you know, all this power, all this money, if you're running the US government or whoever you are with a lot of power, you know, you can afford to have some percentage of the population not play along.
You don't need, it doesn't need to be an Albanian election in 1982.
Like, you can have some dissent.
dave collum
Unless you're an authoritarian state.
tucker carlson
I guess that's right.
I mean, but even in an effective authoritarian state in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, these are, you know, basically theocracies.
They don't, they don't agree with that.
But they, you know, these are Islamic.
states under Sharia law.
You can kind of dissent.
It's okay.
You just can't do anything really threatening, of course.
But more dissent is allowed in Abu Dhabi than in DC.
I just find that just absolutely incredible.
Like, what is this?
Why can't they allow Thomas Massey to just have his own Massey views?
dave collum
He's a vote.
tucker carlson
He's a vote, okay, but you got hundreds of others.
Like, I just think it's weird.
There's this desire to make sure that nobody sings off the song sheet.
Like, and that person must be killed.
And I, wow.
I just, I don't enforce that among my own children.
unidentified
So.
tucker carlson
Do you know what I'm talking about?
dave collum
No, I absolutely know.
We used to allow opposing views.
tucker carlson
Yeah, I mean, look, if someone is really a threat to the system, well, I think that should be allowed, personally, because the people on the internet depend on what way, but In what way?
I have a very wide strike zone for that, but I get it.
If the system is like, I'm sorry, you're a real threat, we have to kill you.
Okay, systems exist to preserve themselves.
I understand that.
What I really can't even comprehend is someone out there in a place I've never been and never will go among 350 million people is making a noise that I disagree with.
I must crush him.
What is that?
That's just weird to me.
unidentified
Why?
tucker carlson
Why are you going to the effort to shut down all dissent?
dave collum
I don't know, but that's what's happening.
tucker carlson
Oh, I know.
dave collum
Not to swing the topic yet again.
Let me get back to the universities.
People don't understand universities.
There are people who do, obviously, but the average person doesn't.
People are going to say, I'm talking my book.
tucker carlson
take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to explain how universities work so that we'll You're certainly thinking thoughts that most people don't allow themselves to think.
And you are a tenure professor at an Ivy League college and you still have your job apparently.
So that does say something.
dave collum
It would be hard to fire me.
tucker carlson
Apparently.
dave collum
I mean, part of the problem is one of the reasons I got canceled is because I twice fought unionizations.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
And the first time was at the request of the dean of faculty, the second time was at the request of the provost of late night phone call.
You got to fight this, you got to put together a team, and that's the now president.
And so if they fired me, that, that group.
That group was sort of behind my cancellation.
So firing me would have been hard because, you know, witness number one would be, did you ask Column to fight the unions?
And did that lead to, you know, them canceling him and stuff like that?
I really think Cornell's great.
I think most universities are fine.
We needed a fastball past our chin.
Great example, Claudine Gay shouldn't be president of Harvard, shouldn't be on the faculty, shouldn't have a PhD, in my opinion.
That is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities.
But then it's still an exceptional rot.
So I don't see people at Cornell that look like Claudine Gay to me.
And if you actually look in the whole DEI thing, you say, well, universities are super duper DEI.
And I go, you guys are forgetting that a year ago or two years ago, if you weren't DEI, you got destroyed.
The whole system was geared up to make sure you paid dearly if you weren't DEI.
So you had to have your deans of diversity and the world was demanding it.
And don't forget, this is a world where biological men were competing in women's sports.
They still kind of are, but at least it's now starting to dissipate.
And that was considered totally normal and was considered rational.
And if you fought it, you get fired and things like that.
So the universities were simply responding.
Now, they've gotten way left wing.
My colleagues were all hired, all hired based on their skills, guaranteed.
I would have, I'd remember a case if it was a DEI hire.
I remember a case because I would have fought it.
I would have screamed.
I don't shut up on things like that.
We try to find the best person in the world to hire and we go for that person if we can.
And we do pretty well.
And so if you were on a campus, you wouldn't see what was going on.
what we're hearing about.
I don't think.
You'd walk around the campus, everything just looks pretty normal.
tucker carlson
The hardest of the hard sciences, though.
dave collum
Do you think that's the problem?
If I walked over the art squad, I'd see some Looney Tunes, right?
And we're now destroying the cost of an education is too high to waste it.
And so if you're going to spend $300,000, you can't go into a career that you make $40,000.
or that you make $25 because you're a barista.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Right?
It's just no longer even viable.
So you have to.
So colleges, if I were president of Cornellell, I'd put together an elite committee of people I absolutely trusted and say, You guys are in charge of trying to figure out where we should be in twenty years and how to get there.
Because we can't be here in twenty years.
It's not going to work.
Arts and sciences and this whole idea of this broadly based education was formed prior to the cost and was formed when wealthy people went to college.
So you could be frivolous if you wanted.
And getting a sheepskin could get you on Wall Street and be the lead analyst for all the dot coms, Henry Blodget style, right?
Those days are gone.
And so colleges are going to have to tighten up.
But my colleagues are, I would say, on average, out of 30 colleagues, I'll say maybe, I think 27 of them are left of center.
And I can't explain why.
Now, when I talk to them, totally rational people, totally reasonable people.
The way it works as a chemist is you are an entrepreneur.
You get a job.
They give you startup money to get started.
You have to then go raise money.
Funding rates are ballpark, maybe 15% of the people get funded.
By the way, the ones who never get funded, they've dropped off.
So that 15% is people still trying.
And I'm going to brag, I put 21 in a row successfully.
Do the math on that.
That's improbable.
But my colleagues are constantly battling.
They're putting together this program.
They're running research groups of anywhere from five to thirty.
No one pays for that.
They raise the money from the federal system.
You say, well, the Fed shouldn't pay the money.
Well, years and years ago, we decided the way to run a research program in the United States was through universities and federal grants.
It was a Sputnik thing.
There's other ways to do it.
But we set up that system.
And if you look at all the startup companiesies around the country and all the pharmaceutical agents, they all, you can trace their origins back to academic labs.
Pfizer discovers far fewer drugs than they buy from some small startup that came out of some biochemistry department or some medical school or something.
And so the academic research area is the foundation level starting point.
I have a number of friends who are worth a fortune because they patented something.
And that's actually good because it would be neutralized and not even usable by the free market if it didn't have the patent coverage.
So it puts an incentive system in there, right?
Cornell gets some, the investigator gets some, the department gets some, and the world gets a new drug.
It's not a crazy system.
Now, there's other ways to do it, but that's not how we do it.
And we produce the best science.
So it worked.
Now, the problem is that Trump threw a fastball past our chain and we deserved it.
We absolutely deserved it.
So he's saying, look, get rid of the guys in sports, which Penn did with Leah Thomas, get rid of the DEI, which a lot of schools are trying to and at the same time ducking you know naming them by different things but but the fastball was needed the problem is he he as you said at breakfast it was the social stuff that trump was going after but you don't go after the social stuff with social stuff you go after it by going
after the money right so harvard's locked down for nine billion dollars of research funds and my understanding is it's still locked down Cornell's locked down for over a billion.
tucker carlson
Harvard was getting nine billion from the feds for research for various reasons.
And it's on hold.
dave collum
And it's on hold.
And the word cancel versus frozen i i was trying to figure it out colombia i thought it was a canceled or columbia got crushed um and then columbia put out a memo that said canceled now i don't know if that's because it's been canceled but what my understanding is the money's not flowing Now, the problem is, as a trustee said to me, you know, if this goes into 2026, we're in a world of trouble.
I said, if this goes into August, we're in a world of trouble.
I've got colleagues with 15-person research groups that are all funded by these federal grants, and they do good science.
They do good science.
There's probably some crap in the humanities, but they suck about $10,000 of grant money out of the system to do that stupid thing.
I don't know.
And I don't even know if it's stupid.
And there's no, so now if you're getting your PhD, there's no one who can give you a postdoc.
That's the next step.
That step is broken.
And so the system right now is on, it's flatlined.
And I really wish they'd gotten rid of USAID and you told me they did and they just moved it.
Well, that's a problem.
But I think the academic research system was working.
tucker carlson
I think part of the problem from a civilian perspective are the endowments.
Now let me expla just complete the thought by saying it's the no tax part that I think drives some of us to want to sort of storm the campus with guns because that's, you know, everyone's getting, I mean, the private equity guys are taking all their income as interest, so they're paying half the rate.
But for a normal person, you know, you're paying over half of everything you make to the government and it's being spent on nonsense or given to Ukraine.
And then there are these giant hedge funds called university endowments that aren't paying any taxes.
And I think that can really drive people bonkers, including me.
unidentified
Well, I understand.
dave collum
There are some subtleties of endowments.
Again, it's not to say that you're not 100% correct, but I at least want to say to your listeners, so they understand what they're complaining about.
First and foremost, there supposedly are rules where the universities are not supposed to be competing with the private sector.
get around those.
But if Cornell builds housing is making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks the rule, right?
But they build dorms and things like that.
So you're right about that.
The endowments are.
a funny game.
First and foremost, I looked this up last week.
Approximately 50% of all endowment spin off.
So it spins off that revenue and Harvard's has been collecting since 1656.
50% of the money spun off goes to financial aid, which means making college more affordable.
Admittedly, not very affordable for a lot of people, but making it more affordable.
So half of the money being spun off is going right back to education of the students.
Another twenty percent subsidies for academic programs, which means paying for things that would have had to be paid for or we'd have to do without.
And I would argue we got bloated.
So there's things we should have done without.
If you look at the dining program now compared to what they have now, it's really unbelievable.
tucker carlson
I'm not against good food, I'm against DEI administrators and administrators in general.
Like college should be focused on that.
dave collum
I agree with that.
I agree with that.
And that's where we should have gotten the fastball pass.
tucker carlson
Does any of these schools have more tenure professors than they have administrators?
dave collum
I don't think so.
The administrative bloating is a combination of all the problems that drive you num nuts and the fact that the interactions between the university and the the feds and the states has gotten more complicated.
Right.
So for example, you need way more bean counters.
And grant writers and well, no, grant writers are me.
tucker carlson
Okay.
dave collum
They're us.
The grants are being written by the faculty.
And again, the DEI, Michigan's DEI payroll was 93 million last time I read about it.
That's a lot of money, right?
But, but, but, but just when you get a federal grant, there's so many things you have to do.
Used to, they ran.
it out of a shoe box.
Here's your check, spend it wisely.
You know, that's what it's no longer like that.
Now it reached the absurd point where you're supposed to make statements about how you're going to save the whales and donate organs to Guatemalan orphans and things like that.
And I think Trump's going to successfully get a lot of that crap out of there.
He would save Cornell a fortune if he could get rid of all of DI.
Now, I do think the original idea of affirmative action makes sense.
It basically said, go find people who are being missed.
Look into the dusty corners where you normally don't look and see if you find talent, right?
There's a famous chemist named Henry Gilman.
tucker carlson
I thought the SAT was designed to do that.
dave collum
No, the it turns out the SAT has problems now.
And the reason it has problems is because when Kaplan got hold of it, it and they they for profit coached kids on how to do well.
And then they made it such that the SAT could be taken three times and you get to use only the one you like.
All of a sudden the cost of maximizing your score on the SAT became prohibitive.
And so it's a legitimate argument that someone coming out of the hood cannot take the Kaplan course and take the SAT 3.0.
So but you shouldn't get rid of it.
You should just be aware of what it's telling you.
tucker carlson
Would it be possible to design a corruption-free screen for intelligence and initiative?
dave collum
Shut up, racist.
tucker carlson
No, but I mean, so the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education.
dave collum
We're just going to locate and discover kids who've got double 800s who you wouldn't have spotted.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
dave collum
Right.
tucker carlson
And actually, I have a child who got an 800, couldn't get into college.
So clearly it's like the system has gotten so corrupt.
So, but the idea in Kaplan, you said corrupted it as well.
dave collum
Well, it kind of corrupted the SAT.
tucker carlson
That's what I'm saying.
dave collum
The GRE, which is the next level, is nowhere near as corrupted because by then the students don't give a damn.
They just don't take the GRE.
So it's more legit.
tucker carlson
But is there, I mean, but the idea of a colorblind, class blind, pure, you know, meritocracy test.
I mean, why give up on that?
dave collum
Here's what I think we should do.
I was graduate, I was a graduate, director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years, record.
The only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department.
So that's pretty good for being the chemistry doucheback.
And you learn about things.
And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years because, and you read regions.
So I might read Manhattan, for example, and you learn about who's applying and stuff like that.
And what I think you want to look for is a system where you see evidence that a kid overcame something.
And it's not about color, although you could say non statistically it's about color right but a kid from the Ozarks you know a JD Vance who I find his origin story a little suspicious I must admit um but but but so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshines and skittles rainbows in his application and one of his line of writers said his mother died here his father died here he was raised by his neighbors you know and I'm going and he didn't mention it I hope you let him in oh my god yes
You give me in graduate admissions.
I see some kid from Stanford with a I see some kid from Stanford with 3.0.
I didn't take him because a 3.0 is a kid who accepted a 3.0.
You show me, I'll take a 4.0 from St Mary's College of the Divinity because that kid said, here's the, they said, here's the highest you can get to.
That kid got there, right?
MIT kids with lousy GPAs are lousy grad students, even though they're smarter than hell, but they're cocky.
Now, it turns out you show me a kid from Stanford with a 3.0 who played football.
I take the kid in heartbeat.
You show me a kid from Stanford who is a 3.0, who is a brilliant violinist.
I'll take that kid.
My here's my son my son applies to Cornell for reasons you know he was going to get in but his resume I had one son who was underachiever as a kid who's now phenomenal and the one who is a super achiever what's super achieving and we didn't push him because it was a pain in the ass we're driving all the time all-state orchestra first violin Gold medalist in the eight-state regional gymnastics championship.
Fifth in the nation equestrian.
Played lacrosse.
Got a resume better than that.
So here's what happened.
My older son, who could care less about school, just nothing.
His teacher was like, sweet kid, no attention.
At one point I said to a teacher, I said, the only kids he's beaten are crack babies.
And she kind of blew a snob bubble and then said, yeah.
He's now phenomenally successful.
He's a super dad.
I'm so proud of the level of dadness that he is.
He's the director of event management at the Council on Foreign Relations.
After being the most underwhelming kid in high school, he grew up.
He climbed Mount Stupid a little bit late.
Fortunately, he was in a family that could help him get over it when the time came.
The thing that we get credit for is not breaking him, is not forcing him into a mold that didn't fit.
You know who he is?
You know the book, Ferdinand the Bull?
unidentified
Of course.
dave collum
Trial Story?
unidentified
Yeah, yeah.
dave collum
That book wasn't for kids.
That was for the parents.
That was telling the parents, your kid is Ferdinand, maybe.
My other one was Mike Mulligan's steam shovel.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Right?
The more people watched, the faster he went.
Ironically, the overachiever got to just grew nicely in college.
Now the younger one is now a professional after trying cubicle farming and all that crap that you get by being a business major at Cornell Hotel School.
He's a professional violinist in Boston.
tucker carlson
Better outcome.
dave collum
Better outcome.
Bank of Dad's important because violinists in Boston don't make a lot of money.
But I'm happy to support it because it's his soul.
You know why he's a you want neurobiology?
My wife was flat on her back when she was pregnant.
She put headphones against her stomach and played classical music when he was in the womb.
I know prenatal development's important.
By the time he's three years old, his friends are singing BINGO and he's listening to orchestra pieces and he'd say, I like this part right here and you'd hear the second violins coming there and you'd go, right there, I like that.
And I'm going, holy shit, this kid's got an ear.
He has an ear like you.
He developed an ear from the womb.
So don't do that to your womb.
You'll have a musician in your family if you do that.
tucker carlson
So I want to ask you here, since you mentioned the struggle, you know, the triumph, but also the struggle to pay for it because the economy doesn't support young people very well since you did call the financial collapse of 2008 it sounds like in 2002 in 2002 so you couldn't short you couldn't get rich shorting anything um i i shorted twice and it's all shortings for fools and pros and the ven diagram of those two is almost that that's
dave collum
exactly right there are both i know both yes yeah uh where are we now We're in a catastrophic situation.
tucker carlson
Catastrophe seems strong.
dave collum
Yeah.
Well, I think you can make arguments the economy has a lot of problems.
And there's a paradox.ical problem with the economy, and that is you can go up to any 711 and they can't hire.
There's help wanted, Ad.
So it looks like an economy burning hot.
But if you look at the high end, there's layoffs going everywhere.
There's foreshadowing of real trouble coming.
tucker carlson
So college graduates, even Ivy League graduates, humanities graduates, not engineers or chemists, but...
dave collum
The kind that they're trained for, certainly.
tucker carlson
Yeah, but there's just, I mean, I know a bunch of them, but you see the numbers, educated 22-year-olds are having trouble getting jobs, but 711 can hire.
dave collum
Right.
tucker carlson
So what is that?
dave collum
Well, so this is a normal sort of it's a distorted version of, I think, a recession coming or in.
Now, where it gets complicated is if you don't believe the inflation numbers, which I don't, and you've got Chapwood Index and Shadow Stats that give inflation numbers that are probably on average six or seven percent higher than the official numbers.
The official numbers are corrupted.
And I don't want to go into it because it's technical, but the CPI is the CPI's crap.
tucker carlson
Right.
I agree with that.
dave collum
Now, here's the problem.
If the economy has been growing two point five percent and the inflation is numbers are underestimated by four, which means we've been in a recession all the way.
tucker carlson
Yeah, moving backwards.
dave collum
We're moving backward.
And you say, well, that can't happen.
The recessions last, you know, two quarters or whatever.
And I go, no, the British Empire was in a recession for a century.
Right?
They just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.
And so, so, no, you can be in, you can, you can be in a slow decline.
So, but that's not what we're, that's not the catastrophe.
tucker carlson
Recession means decline.
dave collum
Yeah.
Actually, I think it's a stupid word because it's like you play golf.
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
Well, if you play golf and you go down into the sand trap, according to the definition of a recession, once you start climbing out, you're out.
You ask a golfer if he's out of the sand trap because he's on the upslope of the trap, he's not.
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
So the fact that your economy is now growing again, if it's coming out of a hole, as far as I'm concerned, you're not out until you've gotten past that previous period.
tucker carlson
So you're at par.
dave collum
Yeah, so you're at par, right.
Now, that's not the catastrophe because they happen all the time and we've been able to either cover them or fake them or prevent them through very bad monetary policy.
what's bad um pumping the stock market is just stupid but but you know private equity buys private equity um buys uh has bought up 80% of the hospitals, the healthcare.
And what they do is they go in and they they they buy some organization.
They strip it of its assets.
They load it with debt.
They pay themselves huge fees and bonuses and then they sell the shell of a company which is now effectively worthless into the marketplace like to pension funds who are not smart enough to recognize that they just bought a piece of crap.
And according to Gretchen Morgan, a 47% bankruptcy rate.
tucker carlson
Now, pub post sale.
dave collum
Post sale.
Now, as long as it's profitable to buy viable companies, destroy them, sell the shell and make money, money's too loose.
Precious capital, if capital is of real value, it's a moat.
So a good businessman can get capital, bad businessman can't.
The fact that BlackRock could get, get, buy single family dwellings, which is a terrible business.
You really can't make money unless you can, unless there's a housing boom and you leverage up to hell.
The fact that they could get it for at an interest rate of 0.15% is a highly flawed system.
And that's where the inventory went after 007-09.
It got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people.
So they basically scooped up the housing market with free money.
With free money, kind of free money, unlike, you know, credit cards, which are 25%, right?
tucker carlson
And that's just free.
dave collum
I mean, once you factor in inflation it's it's a gift yeah it's it's it's it's it's it's profitable money literally just taking the loan is profitable yes you don't have to do anything with it yes yes right yeah so so here here's what happened somehow um the market has ceased to respond and the reason market's important is because um it's because of the wealth effect and that is that if you own equities you own a house
and they're soaring in price your spending habits change you you you i'm having a great year for example so when the bank of dad has to provide some liquidity to the children.
I feel okay about it, right?
The problem is that it's a false wealth.
It's not real wealth.
It's a false wealth.
So what happened?
Well, I'm getting tired of seeing these.
I see four-year plots of the equity market and they make various comparisons.
I go, don't go back four years.
Don't go back 40 years.
Go back 120 years.
So I follow about.
25 metrics of valuation.
Valuation is inherently a price of the market relative to something it ought to track, whether it's the earnings earnings, the revenues, the book value, I think Althobin's Q, the GDP, which is a fictional number as I've heard you recently say.
But I've thought about twenty five of them.
So you can kind of track whether the markets have gotten expensive relative to the thing it ought to track.
Now, around 1981, the markets were at the cheapest valuation, arguably in history.
Inflation was scaring everyone, which is why they were cheap.
It turns out that the boomers were just hitting the workforce.
So demographics was a huge tailwind starting around then.
And most economists agree demographics is huge.
Now, I'm disingenuous in that I quote economists selectively.
In the next sentence, I'll probably say something horrible about them.
And so I'm obviously cherry picking my data, but economists like demographics.
So the boomers at the workplace, so it was almost guaranteed.
I think Reagan was not important.
I think he did some very important things, but I think whoever got to be president was going to be at the beginning of a boom.
It turns out that China was coming out of the dark ages.
They started selling labor and They were so desperate for capital when they sent their leader, don't make me pronounce his name, to the United Nations when he first started opening up.
tucker carlson
Was it Deng Xiaoping?
Yes.
dave collum
And they had to scrounge to get the money to send him.
I mean, they really didn't have any foreign capital.
And so I remember when China said we're going to let our workers keep some of their profits.
And it's like, whoa.
Russia had, the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, but they were in trouble.
So they were obviously cranking a resource base as hard as they could.
and we had our guys in there helping them and stuff like that.
And interest rates were at all times highs.
And if you read a 1999 article by Buffett, who I think is a hoser, I think he's much more of a stock jobber, much more of a conniver than he is, he loves to be the mafia don walking around in a bathrobe saying I'm harmless.
He is not harmless.
When, when, when, when we're in the bottom, he breaks all sorts of laws.
They do all sorts of insider crap to bail the system out.
But he pretends to just like Dairy Queen and Coca Cola, whatever.
He wrote an article in 1999 that said, you want to understand secular big long bull versus bear markets it's all interest rates he said it's not GDP he said from 67 to 81 everything sucked it treaded water uh not accounting for inflation and the markets dropped 75 percent accounting for inflation so it was a horrible period he said the GDP grew faster during that period than from 81 to 99 but interest rates from 67 to 81 went up monotonically
from 81 to 99 they went down so we started in 81 with interest rates in the high teens and over the next 40 years they dropped to zero.
That is absolutely the story.
So when interest rates are dropping, risk assets go up.
tucker carlson
Yep.
dave collum
Because they're competing against and as they get cheaper.
So bottom line is that we just enjoyed 40-year recency bias.
tucker carlson
Can you just explain that?
dave collum
principle right there you said as interest rates drop risk assets go up where you're going to buy shares of a stock that by the way has treated you like crap over the previous 14 years or a bond that pays you 17 right right so the bonds become less the fixed income becomes less and less attractive steadily for 40 years now take the case K. Schiller PE, which is just one of the metrics, but I happen to like it.
It's a kind of an averaged earnings, price-earnings ratio.
It also doesn't allow you to cheat because it doesn't use the immediate and forward PEs are stupid, but K. Schiller averages.
So I like it.
If you take the K. Schiller from 1880 to 1990, it just channels.
It's a valuation metric and it just goes up and down and up and down.
And that's what it should do.
It responds to things, but it stays in a channel.
It's flat.
Valuation metrics shouldn't trend.
They should trend for a while, but then they should.
regress to the mean unless you can someone can give me an argument why they should trend and I don't think there is one and I've tried to find one and then in 1990 they just kind of started to take off and the case Schiller so the case Schiller PE the case Schiller PE averaged around 12, 13 percent for 110 years.
And around 1990, oddly, 1994, in every metric is when things left.
I think it was because of a bond problem or something.
I haven't been able to quite figure out why.
But the valuations went up.
Now here's the problem with valuations going up.
And now they're astronomical.
So the K-Shiller PE averaged 13, which meant it was priced to return about 8%.
eight percent a year right if you think of it as a gas station and you're paying you know thirteen to one earnings you're getting about eight percent and and it keeps pumping gas every year you get about thirteen percent um it is now thirty eight it's way above where it should be it's a factor of three two hundred percent Now,
if you assume it's never going to regress to the mean, now you're accepting, crudely speaking, a two and a half percent return, not an eight.
Now, if you're okay with two point five percent, that's fine, but by the way, most pensioners, most boomers are not planning on two point five percent.
tucker carlson
They're not right.
dave collum
Now, if it regresses to the mean, it's a 70 percent correction assuming, if it's fast, assuming nothing else changes, no damage to the economy, you know, all the bad things that happen when you lose 70 percent off the equity market, which is a questionable assumption.
Another way to think about it, which I think is much clearer, is if you say, look, we'll just grow our way.
I think it goes up or down or up and down.
You don't worry about the path.
You say if we grow two and a half percent a year, which I just questioned as being valid, but let's assume it's valid.
If we grow two and a half percent a year, to get back to historical average of 13, we'll take 45 years.
Now here's the thing, I made no assumptions about good news, bad news.
I assumed it's going to be like the 20th century.
Two and a half percent a year, it'll be 45 years from now.
I don't care what path you follow.
If we are at the average KSU or PE and the economy grew two and a half percent a year, the equity markets will have returned capital gains zero.
And it doesn't matter if we crash and spike.
It doesn't matter if, you know, if we get to, you know, a Dow 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, 45 years from now, if we're at the mean, we will have earned nothing.
Now you say, well, that would never happen.
You go, well, if you own the 06, the 1906 high, you...
tucker carlson
I don't ask from if you were even after 40 years.
dave collum
If you buy the if you own the top.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
People always say, well, how long did it take to get back to the top?
That's a favorite question.
You go, oh, you know, it took 22 years.
Oh, it took 15 years.
Oh, it took.
I like to ask the question, no, no, no.
Not how long it took to get from the top back to even.
How long did it take to go from that top to the last time that that price was attained, adjusted for inflation?
And those can go anywhere from 40 to 75 years.
All you have to do is look at inflation adjusted S ⁇ P and draw a line from a top across the S ⁇ P, and you will find that most of them break even in the mid eighties, no matter what year they started.
tucker carlson
So you're just answering the question, what the hell is going on with land prices and asset prices?
dave collum
Oh, everything.
Everything's mispriced.
tucker carlson
But is it mispriced?
I mean, if I've got excess money, you know, and I need to store it somewhere and I'm listening to you, I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to buy something a little less volatile, a little more real.
dave collum
Like real estate.
tucker carlson
Exactly.
unidentified
Okay.
dave collum
The first time, and I know this drives you bananas.
The first time home buyers not.
too many decades ago were on average about 30 years old.
tucker carlson
Yep.
dave collum
I just read, what's the fact?
I don't know, 56 now.
First time home buyers, 56.
tucker carlson
That's kind of a massive.
dave collum
Do you want to buy?
Do you want to buy that into that market that somehow seems like it has to regress because you can't have people going 56 years without owning a house.
Right?
You said, you personally, I think it was in Turning Point USA, you went absolutely nonstop about how you can worry about Ukraine, but we've got guys, we've got young adults who can't raise families and houses.
tucker carlson
Yeah, and it creates a very scary political environment where people don't own anything and therefore have nothing to lose and no future.
dave collum
Right.
Well, here's an interesting ADHD moment.
Monogamy versus polygamy.
And this will sound random, but it'll get you to the same thing.
tucker carlson
No, it's a core question.
Actually, these are the building blocks of the West.
dave collum
It turns out polygamy, monogamy is viewed as favoring women.
That turns out to be backwards.
And it's a simple math.
Imagine there's a hundred people ranked one to one hundred.
Number one hundred, mister Big Cheese.
And on the women's side, hottest chick on the planet, right?
Right.
Monogamy says number one would marry number one, number two would marry number two in the perfect system.
So think of it as just a very simple model.
And that what you can't do is if you're at the bottom of the chain, marry up.
tucker carlson
Right.
dave collum
If you do, then someone else gets pushed down.
tucker carlson
Of course.
dave collum
Right.
So it would be of the interest of the girl working 711 to be Jeff Bezos' second wife.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
I think that happened.
dave collum
So in fact, you can upgrade.
your game and, you know, Elon, right?
I mean, the guy's a reproduction machine, right?
The women are signing off on it because it's better to be with a guy worth that kind of money than broke, right?
And so it turns out that you say, well, then why did cultural evolution lead to monogamy?
And the answer is, is because it minimizes violence.
tucker carlson
Right.
dave collum
It's for the men.
tucker carlson
Of course.
dave collum
So they don't fight.
tucker carlson
Well, yeah, because in a polygama system, all the high status males scoop up all the women.
dave collum
Well, now in a situation where men can't provide the home for their families and stuff like that.
And so we're going to fight.
tucker carlson
I've noticed.
dave collum
I've noticed that too.
And so now here's the deal.
Let's say we're I'm right and we're to market top.
And if if I'm not, I think we're close.
One of the things that my peers who were paranoid as hell about this, some very smart guys, they tend not to put numbers on it.
I'm one of the few who puts numbers on it.
There's a couple others who do, but they just say all the valuations are ridiculous.
But no one wants to be on record that we're going to say it's catastrophically overpriced.
Whatever correction you get, you say, see, I told you, I'm saying 200% overpriced.
Now, how do you get out of overvaluation?
You can't inflate your way out.
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
Because the numerator, the price, and the denominator, the thing it's supposed to track, both are influenced by inflation.
So as your price goes up because of inflation, your revenues go up because of inflation.
You're still 200% over historical average valuation.
And so you can't inflate away an overvaluation.
tucker carlson
So what I mean., is this just a gravity scenario or ultimately it has to revert to its actual value?
dave collum
The best model I have and they never work because it's always one of these, something will be creatively different, but the best model is the Nikkei.
Japan hit a high in 1989.
It briefly got back to that 35 years later.
It's actually below that, I think, if I remember correctly.
Inflation adjusts for that guaranteed is below.
tucker carlson
Yes, that's right.
dave collum
I asked someone during a podcast if you can do this spreadsheet for me.
I'd love to get it.
Someone did it.
I said, what if you started buying the Nikkei at the top?
Not own the Nikkei at the top, you're dead meat.
You died broke.
But what if you started buying?
22-year-old graduate of Tokyo University.
You started putting yen into the knee k in 1989.
How long if you average in did it take you to break even?
It's around two decades.
Starting with zero in the knee k.
So I was on a podcast with George Noble, Twitter space actually.
He was Peter Lynch's right hand.
And he said, well, you could I said, I think the markets will be uninvested.
He said, oh, you could do this and this.
And I said the knee k.
And he said, oh, you could short.
I said, no, you couldn't.
You can't short a market that takes twenty years to find a buyer.
You can short a market like in 07 to to 2009, a volatile market.
Yes.
tucker carlson
You can't a market in inexorable decline can't be short.
dave collum
So for in a top, aren't tops supposed to be euforic?
Remember the dot com?
tucker carlson
Oh, yes.
dave collum
The world was changing, the nifty fifty, you know, um, web van and eat tours, pets dot com dot You know, sustainable prosperity.
We are supposed to be true believers that the world is wonderful.
Do you feel much of the population thinks the world's wonderful?
tucker carlson
I don't.
I don't feel that.
And all around us are signs of.
dave collum
What's it going to look like when seventy percent get cut off from this market?
tucker carlson
So I'm immediately going to prepper survival mode.
Where are the enduring safe stores of value?
dave collum
I don't, you can't answer that.
I bought gold at around 270 an ounce.
tucker carlson
270.
dave collum
270.
tucker carlson
Hope you bought a lot of it.
dave collum
I did, but it's worth a lot more now.
tucker carlson
Do you think?
dave collum
Yeah.
tucker carlson
What's spot price today?
Do you know?
dave collum
Ballpark 3300.
unidentified
Yeah.
dave collum
I bought silver.
I bought gold below 270.
I'll tell you why, because my first purchases were actually in a close-on mutual fund that was trading 27% below net asset valuation because no one, people say, Oh, it was easy to buy back back then.
It was cheap.
I said it was cheap because five of us wanted it.
tucker carlson
Right.
Well, of course.
dave collum
Right.
And by the way, the top, some Tuesday afternoon at 2:03 p.m., we will hit a top that will be decades later to be returned to potentially.
The top is the point of maximum optimism, which paradoxically is the moment in time where your justification for optimism is zero.
The bottom is the same thing in reverse.
tucker carlson
Of course.
dave collum
So we're not happy now.
tucker carlson
So you're saying the herd is not always right, is Ocean saying?
dave collum
right as OSHA's I'm told.
tucker carlson
So let's hold on.
Let's just go back to gold for a second.
unidentified
So you buy I bought gold net at around 210.
tucker carlson
Come on.
dave collum
Well, I bought it 28% below NAV when it was physical delivery.
No, that was not physical, but then I started buying.
Here's what I did.
I bought gold from the local coin dealer.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
And I'd say, when you get ounces, I'll pay cash.
And he sold it to me at spot.
And, and he'd call and say, I got three ounces in.
I'd go to the bank.
I'd get out 900 dollars, right?
And I'd buy the gold from him.
Cash.
I buy silver from him.
Cash.
I could buy silver eagles at Spot.
unidentified
You go on eBay, holy shit, those things are like $10 above Spot.
dave collum
And it was for ballpark $4 an ounce.
And then I remember it was at $4.57, and I was buying from him.
And he said, don't you think there's a top?
He knew I was going to buy it.
He said, don't you think there's a top?
tucker carlson
$457 an ounce for gold.
dave collum
It was like $0.03 or something.
I don't know.
and i said how many people are buying gold from you he said oh about four and i said and the other three are my friends aren't they he said yeah and i said does that sound like a like a mania to you?
And so, here's the thing I've been on.
I'm a big fan of energy, but I think when the selling starts, everything sells.
You'll be selling your children.
You'll be selling, right?
Everything sells.
So I think the idea of trying to get into any risk assets so dangerous, I'll take four percent on a treasury, two-year treasury.
Some people think, you know, I'll lock it up for two years.
Oh, that'll save me.
I won't dip by after six months.
tucker carlson
So at what price would you buy gold again?
dave collum
Well, I've got so much I don't need anymore.
If I didn't own any, I'd buy it now.
But the Bitcoin guys to say buy Bitcoin at 117,000.
I turned it down at 10.
I wish I'd bought it.
I would have sold it at 50 and spent the proceeds on therapy.
tucker carlson
Why on therapy?
dave collum
Because I would have sold it at 50.
tucker carlson
Right.
Good point.
dave collum
So I know I would have.
I know I would have.
tucker carlson
So you don't believe in crypto.
dave collum
I don't think so.
The crypto community, I am their number one target.
They say you are a hodler.
and I won't buy it.
The reason is because I believe that...
One is that I believe that the authorities are not going to let crypto take over.
Of course not.
tucker carlson
And by the way, that means that they're going to lose total control over our society.
Yeah, I don't think so.
dave collum
You think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Kaiser and Michael Saylor?
I don't think so.
tucker carlson
You don't think so.
dave collum
Here's what I think it actually is.
You know, the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys.
Yeah.
That means I think if I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare.
I would do it the way they did.
I'd release the crypto.
I'd have guys pumping it.
I'd have guys supporting it.
I'd let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it.
And then I'd say, okay, it was.
We'll take it from here.
tucker carlson
And in the process, of course, you acclimate people to this new digital world.
New kind of commerce.
Yeah, exactly.
No, that's it.
And I get rid of the ATMs and I would make airport convenience stores credit card only.
And I would do all that stuff to change people's.
dave collum
Cash is liberty.
tucker carlson
Of course.
Oh, I couldn't agree more.
unidentified
So.
tucker carlson
You just have too much gold.
You just don't want any more gold.
dave collum
I just, no, no, that's, I'm.
tucker carlson
What about real estate right now?
dave collum
I'm long.
I own a nice house.
I'm long real estate by owning that house.
I wouldn't buy real estate as a speculation.
If I, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say maybe farmland, but that's been getting scooped up.
That's a pretty trite narrative now.
tucker carlson
Big time.
Well, I follow that because I'm interested.
And I mean, it's turning for just crazy numbers an acre.
dave collum
And that Well, that's a problem.
tucker carlson
That's what I'm saying.
dave collum
So So here's what I watched for years and then jumped in.
And it's a problem.
The modern market, I bought gold steadily from 1999 through about 2003.
And then I bought some more when it was around 1200 in the teens.
I said, okay, it's kind of flattened out.
I'm going to get some more.
So around, bought it around 1200 dollars in maybe 2016 or something.
But the modern markets don't wait.
If you get a good idea and social media and stuff, it will close up that gap so fast you won't know what hit you.
So I'm bullish on energy long term, energy equities and stuff, but I think they're going to sell before they become a good buy.
So I just can't commit a lot of money to the energy, even though I think I have some mutual funds on uranium based investments, which I think we gotta go to.
And now it looks like we are.
I actually think AI is not demanding nuclear energy.
I think AI is being used as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support.
I think they're using the buzz of AI to say, now let's get the nukes going.
People say, yeah, nukes.
We need it for the AI.
We've needed nukes.
It was the obvious next thing to go to.
Platinum.
For years I watched Platinum owned so little platinum that if it went to zero, I wouldn't even notice.
I mean, trivial, trivial amount.
And I've been watching it's been flat.
I mean, flat as in like a flat line, not moving away from $900 an ounce by a few dollars flat for 10 years after dropping.
And I can go, what's the platinum story?
Well, the platinum story is, um, I don't trade.
I don't trade at all.
If I buy it, I'm buying it saying, look, I'm hanging on to it.
If it goes down, I'm, um, I don't trade.
The platinum story is, I don't believe in the EV.
I don't think it's a good technology.
I think it'll be here, but I don't think it's going to take over the world.
I think the hybrids are going to take over the world.
tucker carlson
Well, they make sense.
They make inherent sense.
dave collum
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're more efficient.
They use more platinum than EV than internal combustion engines.
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Because because their catalytic converters burn colder, so they need more platinum.
Now, here's where it gets real interesting.
The platinum miners are in Russia and South Africa.
Russia will therefore have control.
South Africa could become a failed state so fast you don't know what hit you, right?
More to the point, and again, trying to get real facts on this stuff, but the above ground platinum supply, the available platinum supply is something like three billion dollars, which is something a medium sized hedge fund could buy at current prices.
It's been in deficit production for at least four years.
tucker carlson
What does deficit production mean?
dave collum
It means that we're consuming more per year than the mine is going to produce.
Okay.
Based on the rate of deficit production that the above ground supply will be gone within about a year.
tucker carlson
So there's no more platinum.
dave collum
Arguably we could go to potentially palladium, but you know, whatever.
Platinum has not gone through a meme phase, so my little trader and me says that meme phase could get spectacular.
Platinum could go to 20,000 because it has industrial uses.
unidentified
Right.
tucker carlson
You know, it seems kind of natural.
dave collum
So I decided I was so I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the curves and I make I'm sarcastically occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can't do it or don't believe in it or whatever.
But I asked a few, I said, look at this plot.
Where would you start getting excited?
Because it's been flat for 10 years.
I don't need to put money in and have it sit there for 10 years more.
And a few gave me opinions about what price.
I kind of formulated an opinion where I had to start and then hit it.
Now, instead of buying it, you know, slowly, I said in the modern era, you got to move quick.
So I started hitting the buy button.
And I'm still not.
I face a boomer dilemma.
The boomer dilemma is the good news is.
my net worth is good enough.
If I don't screw up, I'm fine.
I mean, I could retire today, not earn another penny.
Fine.
I want to leave money to my kids.
I will be able to.
The paradox is that to commit to an asset requires committing a percentage that's not stupid.
If you commit 0.01% of your assets to it, it's not going to make a difference no matter what happens.
So if you take, well, five percent.
When I look at the quantity of money I have to spend to commit five percent, it seems huge.
But it's only five percent.
And so as a consequence, I go, look, if it went to zero tomorrow, I'd have a bad day.
I'd lose five percent of my assets.
But it would be too much money.
So I'm fighting this bias about how many dollars it takes to get to a I get it.
tucker carlson
So let me ask you just a wrap up question, which is given your description of where we are and you haven't even mentioned what could be a debt crisis when people stop buying our debt or slow down.
But there are all kinds of things to worry about that are seem imminent.
How does the average person respond?
dave collum
They don't have any money anyways.
tucker carlson
Fair.
dave collum
I mean, the average person has no money.
So how does the 5 percentile boomer respond?
tucker carlson
Yeah.
dave collum
Well, years ago I did an analysis on the 5 percentile boomer.
This is how bad it is.
This is years ago, actually.
And it actually got vetted by Stephen Roach, who's executive director of Morgan Stanley.
He looked at my numbers and actually you've overestimated something.
You should be more conservative.
The 5 I invented 5 percentile guy.
At that time, he's worth 1.1.1 million.
He was earning $156,000 a year.
You also know he's not 22 years old.
He's probably a boomer because it takes a while to get to 5 percentile.
At a reasonable rate of withdrawal from a retirement account, mister 5 percentile guy who is has to be living the American dream could take about $48,000 out.
tucker carlson
Annually?
dave collum
Annually.
without risking going broke.
And you know what?
They don't know how to live on $48,000.
tucker carlson
No.
dave collum
And they might have other assets.
This is a complicated analysis, but that's a scary number.
For a modern life, that's a Yeah, well, the but the other thing is if he knew how to live on $48,000, he'd have more than $1.1 million.
tucker carlson
Good point.
dave collum
And so, so we've got a whole generation that has got expectations that are just off the chart distorted, and it's not because of a five-year or ten-year recentcy bias, it's a 40-year recentcy bias.
It's 1981.
Let me finish that story.
From 1981, the valuation, which should not trend, compounded annually 4% a year.
What happens over the next forty years when it compounds negative four percent a year to get to cheap again?
Now you say, well, that'll never happen.
I go, of course it will happen.
Show me an asset class that got overpriced.
It didn't become cheap again.
tucker carlson
Well, if you believe in markets, that's just by definition going to happen.
dave collum
Right.
And if there's a way to fake it so it doesn't happen, then it means you're just deluding as to what actually happened.
You're not getting the reality.
tucker carlson
Right.
dave collum
Right.
And so the bottom line is that the boomer demographic almost by definition was going to generate a bubble, a big mother bubble because of the demographics.
Now, I was telling you about how I was reading my old write--ups from like 13, 14, 15, I make a compelling case that the markets were crazy.
How do I do it?
I use numbers, I use stats, and I use quotes from the most famous money guys in the world.
You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Drucken Miller, you name it, these are not lightweights saying these markets are insanely overvalued in 2015.
What has happened since then?
Straight up.
tucker carlson
Oh, for sure.
dave collum
Example.
Apple tenfold gain on a growth in revenues of 50 percent.
95 percent correction brings that back down.
Microsoft 150 percent gain in revenues, tenfold gain doesn't make mathematical sense.
Let's go to Nvidia.
There is the winner, four trillion dollars of market cap being run by a guy who has a very sketchy past.
25fold gain in revenues.
You go, now we're talking 250fold gain in market cap.
tucker carlson
Yeah, so that's the problem right there.
dave collum
90% correction takes you back to 2015.
Do you remember 2015 being depressed?
I don't.
Stan Drachenmiller didn't think so.
Howard Marks didn't think so.
All these guys who are considered legends thought the markets were insanely overpriced in 15.
And it's been nothing but up.
And that will end.
I don't know when.
tucker carlson
And you think that all asset classes are tied to that.
dave collum
I can't say all because that means 100%.
But I, I, if I found something that I thought was dirt cheap.
unidentified
Um.
dave collum
um i'm glad i own the gold from as cheap as i did because because when it goes down i go i'm still up what 15 fold or something right um so it makes it easier um buying gold now from scratch would be harder it would be that you know the number of dollars to get the percent position that sort of thing um I and I think the debt problem is global.
If you actually look at the metrics for the growth in the global debt relative to global GDP, the entire world has become priced much more than ten years ago relative to what the world produces.
So what's a global debt crisis?
That's the question.
Well, there's you got lenders and borrowers.
It's a zero-sum game.
No, it's not.
tucker carlson
I know.
dave collum
A global debt crisis is when the entire world thinks they're going to get shit that the world can't produce.
And the way you think of how to create one, artificial, Gedanken experiment, let's say the leaders of the world got together and said, look, let's just solve this problem.
Let's guarantee health care to all our citizens.
Let's guarantee their pension, all our citizens.
unidentified
Problem solved.
dave collum
They go, well, but you didn't in any way, shape or form increase the ability to produce wealth.
tucker carlson
Right.
dave collum
So you now have obligations for which you haven't a clue.
How are you going to pay for them?
Who's going to do it?
Are we going to have the Chinese delivering Chinese food to our door still?
I don't think so.
We're going to be delivering food to the Chinese.
So, um, so everything will regress.
Forty year recentcy bias says it won't.
It will.
tucker carlson
On that dark note, um, I'm just picturing myself showing up at a doorstep in Beijing with some kung pao chicken.
dave collum
Hoping for a tip.
tucker carlson
Hoping for a tip.
dave collum
I can see you now.
You, you turn the scanner around and shove the 25% tip in the guy's face.
tucker carlson
Professor, thank you.
I hope this doesn't get you fired and I hope you'll come back.
dave collum
Any time you call, I'm in the car.
tucker carlson
Thank you.
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